AIX The Business Impact of Losing Your Critical System The more critical a project is to a business, the greater attention it deserves. Which is why it puzzles me that many companies have little or no appetite for discussing the most important IT project of them all: disaster recovery. DR is the set of policies and procedures that will
Featured It’s about time! – Time Travelling with DB2 for i Introduction – In this article, I want to run though a great new feature of DB2 that was released as part of the Version 7.3 announcements last month. As the title of this article states ‘It’s about time’! IBM introduced a new feature within the database called temporal support.
Technical Articles Customisation for the VIOS CLI Something I’ve discussed previously but have refined recently is customising the VIOS CLI take make using the CLI and navigation a little easier. Whenever I install a VIOS LPAR the first thing I do is add in a couple of files I keep handy to do a few things
Featured Say Hello to IBM i 7.3 Last week saw both the announcement and shipping of IBM i v7.3, just three days apart, this statement in itself tells you something about the new management style of the IBM i team, as in years gone by it would have taken weeks if not months to get from
Featured Using PHP and RPG to Communicate Together With DataQueues Continuing my articles about PHP and RPG communicating together, this time I will show how these two languages can talk with each other using data queues. If you missed the other parts in this series, you can find them here. Part 1 Part 2 DataQueues If you know all about
IBMi ObjectConnect – Using SAVRSTLIB More of us than ever find ourselves working on more than one system. There are a whole range of reasons for this. Quite often we have separate LPARs on the same physical server for Development and Production or perhaps separate physical servers for High Availability solutions to replicate our Business
Featured Creating and Mapping multiple LUs in SSP If you’ve read any of my previous articles you’ll know that I’m a big fan of VIOS shared storage pools (SSP). I have been lambasted by a number of IBMers for using SSP instead of NPIV but my arguments are: 1. SSPs are fast and will cope
Technical Articles Be the Exception. Become an IT Monitoring Hero. Today’s businesses must be available 24/7 with fewer people having to manage more complex systems and processes. IT departments receive a constant bombardment of information from a diverse variety of operating systems, business applications and critical processes and support a complex array of servers and devices running across
Featured Zipping / Unzipping IFS Objects in IBM i Those of you who know me probably know that I’m a lapsed programmer. These days I spend most of my time working at or below the IBM i Operating System layer but every now and then there is an exception that makes me dust off my coding skills and
Featured USB Flash Drives and IBM i USB Flash Drives, thumb drives, memory sticks, call them what you may, are pretty much everywhere these days and it is a little known fact that you can use them with your IBM i server at no cost. Support was added for these devices for POWER 7 / 8 servers from
Technical Articles Using PHP and RPG to Communicate Together Part 2 This is the second part to my article about PHP and RPG communicating together. If you missed the first part, it can be found here. Last time we discussed PHP calling, and using, the power of RPG. This time let us switch things around and show you how easy it
IBMi Running Open Source PHP Applications Way back in March last year, I wrote an article for PowerWire.eu that talked about how to get started with PHP on IBM i. In that article I touched briefly on the fact that PHP on IBM i gives you the foundations you need to start using a wide
Featured Did IBM just offer you a FREE HMC? OK, so maybe it’s not 100% free, but with the launch of the new Virtual Hardware Management Console (vHMC) the cost of the acquisition for many folks has tumbled by as much as 80% to a point where it’s almost as good as free. IBM have announced the
IBMi Using PHP and RPG to Communicate Together In this article, I wish to take you through how we can communicate between PHP and RPG on our IBM i. I recently had a request from one of our clients asking if I had any examples of calling an RPG program from a PHP script. This gave me the
IBMi Using the VIOS VMR for system backups My previous article discussed how you can upload and load ISO images into the Virtual Media Repository (VMR) to provide virtual optical images to the client LPARs. You may recall that the mkvopt command has an option, -ro, which forces the access mode of the image to read only. When
AIX Test your mksysb backup without NIM or a tape drive There’s a really handy way of cloning an AIX operating system straight from a mksysb backup. Even if you don’t need to clone an OS, it’s a pretty handy way of testing that your mksysb backup will actually be suitable for rebuilding your AIX root volume group.
AIX Basic AIX performance monitoring for IBM i professionals IBM Power Systems have the ability to run both the IBM i and AIX (as well as Linux) operating systems, so how can you leverage your existing IBM i performance analysis skills to provide AIX support? Every system, from Charles Babbage’s first mechanical computers in the early nineteenth century
AIX Tech tip: finding AIX’s save buttons If there’s one thing that I will never get used to about Google Docs, it is that it doesn’t save your changes. Or rather, it does it for you. Well, Mr Google, I want the “save” button back. Even if it doesn’t do anything. There is something
Featured Tech tip: populating the VIOS Virtual Media Repository One of the most useful features of VIOS is the Virtual Media Repository (VMR). This allows us to create and import ISO images and then map these to virtual DVD drives on our client LPARs. Most customers will use the VMR to store their IBM i and/or AIX install
Featured A guide to RPG definitions I would like to take you through the process of defining variables and files in RPG programs. In an effort to promote totally free-form RPG, all the examples shown in this article detail the latest enhancements. Additionally, I will show you equivalents to RPG in other programming languages. I hope
Featured Are IBM i Services the future of systems management? IBM i Services are perhaps the best kept secret of managing and monitoring IBM i. Relatively few users of our favourite platform know what they are and even fewer use them regularly. This is a crying shame as they are truly remarkable. IBM i Services can tell you in seconds
AIX AIX tech tip: Bye-bye loops – use the ‘apply’ command instead One of the best kept secrets of the AIX command line is the “apply” command. Never heard of it? Well, welcome to the club. Two colleagues and I had over 60 years’ combined experience on AIX and, between us, we had never once come across “apply”. So, what does it
AIX Are you using the correct disk driver for your Storwize storage? With so many customers now using Storwize and SVC storage in their Power environment with VIOS, it is important that we get the configuration of the system correct and supported. In the last few months, I have been involved with customers who already have their Power and Storwize systems up
Featured Get started with the RPG debugging alternative I wish to take you through the debugging of RPG programs or service programs with a tool some readers may not have come across called IBM System Debugger. It is a client-based tool that has the following advantages over the Rational RDi debug facility: • It is part of the base
Featured Tips for a happy Zend Server on IBM i We looked in my last article at how to get started with PHP on IBM i. Server side, this involved installing Zend Server – the PHP engine that makes things happen. In this article, I’m going to share some tips with you that relate to configuring this fine software to
